Teaching tuning

FloydG

I like the way in which PianoScope seems to be taking shape as a teaching tool. I appreciate Ed Sutton‘s comments on this in the Piano World forums. I am repeating here something I said that lies buried in a thread he started a few days ago.

“You've got me going Ed! Now I want a new feature in the program -- a pitch raise mode where the tone generator produces not the final pitch for the tuning, but rather the pitch raise target, together with a persistent on-screen mute button to use for tuning unisons-as-you-go.

Also, for major pitch raises, I would value the ability to set a preliminary tuning curve with a smaller number of samples, such that I could bring half a dozen or so strings up to pitch on an instrument that needs a particularly large pitch raise, and create a tuning curve based on them. I do understand that increasing the loading of the soundboard also contributes to inharmonicity change, but this still might take me closer to where I need to be when I proceed to taking a full inharmonicity measurement in preparation for fine tuning.“

I am working with any eager aspiring tuner, and would like to do what I can to minimize early reliance on a visual source. He is most likely to be starting out with pianos that need pitch adjustments before any meaningful work on temperament setting can take place. The tone generating feature of this program could be a game changer in this situation.

Frank Illenberger

Hello Floyd, thank you for bringing this up here. I have already talked with Ed about this.

1) Persistent on-screen mute button: I am already thinking about this but have not decided on a final solution yet. In the meantime, if you have the on-screen keyboard visible, you can simply press the already selected key and it will unselect it and mute the sound. If you tap a key again the sound comes back.

2) Playing the pitch raise target instead of the tuning target: This totally makes sense and is a no-brainer change which I will implement soon.

3) Preliminary tuning curve for pitch raising: This is already implemented. You can directly start into a pitch raise without having to measure the inharmonicity. And in the pitch raise measurement, you can simply play all notes of the a minor triad for example. This is very fast. After the pitch raise, you can perform a full IH measurement for fine-tuning.

4) Hopefully I will find some time over Christmas to work on getting the sound generation feature to function with a bluetooth headset and a locked device. So pianoscope would react to the notes you play and generate the according sound on the headphone. This won't work however for very large pitch raises in which auto note detection can't work.

FloydG

Frank Illenberger 4) Hopefully I will find some time over Christmas to work on getting the sound generation feature to function with a bluetooth headset and a locked device. So pianoscope would react to the notes you play and generate the according sound on the headphone. This won't work however for very large pitch raises in which auto note detection can't work

It seems to me that in the case of very large pitch raises, the note detection would kick in as soon as the played note moves into some reasonable proximity of the target. It would be sufficient to estimate the target aurally.

FloydG

I understand the feature you described in point 3 above. My request is to be able to set a preliminary tuning curve based on a small number of notes already raised to pitch. What you describe would certainly give me the basis to quickly establish that small number of samples, though.

Frank Illenberger

FloydG I am not sure I understand you correctly here. Doesn't the following workflow suit your needs?

1) You create a new tuning document in pianoscope and choose a tuning style and concert pitch.
2) Without going to the inharmonicity panel, you directly start a pitch raise, specifying the pitch raise parameters like bridge & strut positions.
3) In the pitch raise measurement panel, you follow the instructions to measure the a-minor triad notes, or any other subset of notes you want. If you swipe up in this panel, you get the IH panel and see that pianoscope is measuring the inharmonicities in parallel. You can always swipe down again to get back to the pitch panel.
4) When you are done with coarse pitch measurement, pianosope calculates a tuning curve based on the measured inharmonicities and chosen tuning style + concert pitch. In the following tuning screen, the calculated tuning targets are at the zero position and pianoscope gives you overpull/underpull markers to account for the movement of the soundboard and plate.

Isn't this all you need? Or do you want pianoscope to automatically measure the new inharmonicity the strings have after pitch-raising while you are pitch-raising?

FloydG

Thank you for your quick response to my first post! Thank you as well for pointing out that I can mute the note simply by pressing the key. I had not caught that.

FloydG

My perception is that if the pitch level of the piano is far enough out, or if the starting state of tune is chaotic enough, whatever inharmonicity measurements are taken will differ from the post-pitch-raise measurements enough to be significant. Right now, if I've got a piano that is 100 cents out, I simply abandon PianoScope, head over to TuneLab, bring a half a dozen C's up to pitch, measure their inharmonicity for a preliminary tuning curve, and start chipping.

The only obstacle in PianoScope is the number of samples needed before I can start tuning. I need 22 samples to get underway in the coarse measuring mode. I would like to be able to override that and proceed with 6 to 10 samples.

Frank Illenberger

FloydG Thanks for the detailed explanation. Now I understand what you want to do. Currently, you actually don't have to measure all notes pianoscope suggests in coarse or fine tuning mode. pianoscope is satisfied if you measure two notes per octave up to C7. So currently, you can go as low as measuring all Cs and Gs, which is 13 notes.
The reason it is that way is that I wanted to encourage people to measure more notes, because it can be done extremely fast with pianoscope. In your use case, you want to limit the amount of notes you have to tune before you can start the actual pitch raise which takes more time. This makes total sense and I wasn't aware of that approach when I implemented the limit. This is reason enough for me to simply reduce it to one note per octave in the next update. So you would have to measure C1-C7, 7 notes.

FloydG

Thank you, Frank!

Rick

When I have a piano that needs a large pitch raise I find a saved file of a similarly scaled piano, use that and then do a new tuning. Works well and is simple.

FloydG

Rick, the strategy you have identified is an important one, and it is good that you bring it up in this thread. But what motivates me to ask for the program tweak above is that Frank has done such a good job of making his pitch raise function yield results that stand, that I want the truest target I can get at the outset. I’ve used the idea of a 100 cent pitch raise to make a point, and of course, with that big of a project I’m usually not even using overpull on the first pass, but between that scenario and the ones that PianoScope already handles well in its present form, there are others where more options for setting a target at the outset might result in less time spent tweaking at the end.

FloydG

The 7 note inharmonicity measurement does not appear to have been implemented in the 2.5 Beta.

Frank Illenberger

Ah sorry, I totally forgot this. I will add this with the next build.

FloydG

Thank you!

Frank Illenberger

FloydG I've implemented this in the latest TestFlight build 1115 of pianoscope 2.5. Now you can tune even if you have only measured one note per octave.